The Cutting Room Floor

Based solely on trailers, posters, other reviews, his own completely unjustified personal biases, and sheer arrogance, The Vulture reviews the latest movie releases, without actually seeing any of them. This week, sight unseen, The Dark Knight Rises, The Bourne Legacy and Magic Mike get the Vulture treatment.

The Dark Knight Rises

Anyone with any sort of grasp on pop culture has been wetting their pants with anticipation since The Dark Knight Rises was officially announced back in 2010. Once again Christian Bale dons the cape and gravelly voice and inspires us all to fight injustice, regardless of how (in his case, literally) batshit insane it might be.

Hype is a powerful thing, and almost nothing has been hyped as hard as The Dark Knight Rises since, well, The Dark Knight. The masses truly took ownership of The Dark Knight, in a manner that is usually reserved for creepy comic book nerds. And, if The Dark Knight Rises doesn’t live up to expectations, that strange quirk of human behaviour is likely to take over, and we’ll see people take it as a personal insult if Christopher Nolan makes a Batman film that they don’t like.

Batman Begins, the first in Nolan’s Batman trilogy suffers retrospectively in comparison to the second film, The Dark Knight, which is essentially universally acclaimed as the best film ever made by anyone, ever. So will the third one live up to the hype? Probably. It’s Batman.

Fun Fact: No one has ever seen me and the Batman in the same room at the same time. Just sayin.

 

The Bourne Legacy

Is there some sort of conspiracy afoot to make Jeremy Renner an action hero? Don’t get me wrong, he’s a talented actor, but he’s no action hero. First his role in Mission Impossible 4, then The Avengers, now this? The guy looks like he works in accounting for pete’s sake. And now he’s going to be a Bourne – One of the ass-kickingest contemporary action heroes Hollywood has given us this side of Die Hard‘s John McClane?

I have a theory that Jeremy Renner has an absurdly rich father, who is somehow splashing enough cash around to get his more or less vanilla son cast in all these roles that he is woefully underqualified for.

Essentially, Jeremy Renner is Beckka from The Shire.

Fun Fact: I enjoyed The Shire. Deal with it.

 

Magic Mike

Things are getting sexy for women again. Men have been getting their rocks off for far too long, from overt and obvious films like Sucker Punch shoving our own creepy, misguided sexuality down our own throats, to the sweet, simple, pure, unadulterated love every man holds for Emma Stone when she acts in films, appears in funny gifs on the internet, talks, eats, sleeps, breathes or does anything, anywhere.

But now with films like Magic Mike, and the erotic novel 50 Shades of Grey turning heads all over the place it’s the ladies who are getting an eyeful of man-candy. And loving it. Magic Mike stars the increasingly enjoyable Channing Tatum as the titular character, a very successful stripper who appears to find it difficult to leave a life of sleaze behind when he meets a girl he likes. According to the trailer, Matthew McConaughy realised it had been about five whole movies since he took his shirt off on screen, so he’s making up for lost time with his supporting role as a stripper in this film.

Fun Fact: I wish this movie had Emma Stone in it. Good God I love Emma Stone.

Tagged Batman, Beckka, Bourne Legacy, Channing Tatum, Christopher Nolan, Emma Stone, Jeremy Renner, Magic Mike, Matthew McConaughy, The Dark Knigh Rises, The Dark KNight, The Shire